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He shook his head. “You’re not seeing it.”
“No, it looks pretty normal to me.”
“Nothing has changed in the time we’ve been here. Nobody came back for that coffee, that computer screen hasn’t changed, and those papers are all still there.”
I frowned at him. “Maybe whoever’s meant to be at the desk is bunking off.”
“I thought that too, but every single desk on this floor looks identical.”
I got up from the bed and took a look at the laptop. Lucien made the images in the gallery scroll across the screen, and I realized quickly, he was right. Each and every desk behind each and every window was the same. The same cup, the same monitor, and the same files.
“Creepy,” I said.
“I doubt if we’re going to get much insight into what’s going on in there from out here,” he said, “but we’ll get what we can, and then plan our next move.”
I nodded at him, then I looked up at him. Our eyes remained locked for a moment longer than I had intended them to. I wanted to speak candidly with him, to talk to him about what he had said to me the other night, and how he wanted to try to get me away from his father. I couldn’t, though. Not yet.
Lucien had made a pass of the bedroom and had searched for listening devices. Just because he had found none didn’t mean there weren’t any in the room. I had also figured, all by myself, that if there were still bugs in the room, it wouldn’t make sense for them to suddenly go quiet in the middle of the day—a feat I could easily accomplish with a little magic.
We weren’t going to be able to speak freely in here. Not until nightfall, anyway, when it would make sense for the room to go a little quiet.
My stomach rumbled and my eyes fell on the room service booklet lying next to the laptop, its front page proudly showing-off a perfectly toasted BLT sandwich. I suddenly realized it was late afternoon, and we hadn’t eaten anything since my magical demonstration this morning.
I grabbed it and brought it over to the bed, where I opened it and went through it. I had to admit, everything on it looked delicious—and expensive—but since we were on Mason Diaboli’s tab, I figured the cost wasn’t a problem, so I made a note to order the most delicious, most expensive looking things on the menu, and multiples of them, even if we didn’t eat them all.
“Would you prefer the Lobster or the Sirloin?” I asked, as I picked up the room phone. “Actually, you know what, I’ll get you both. You can decide what you want to eat when it gets here.”
Lucien looked over at me, frowning. “What are you doing?”
“Calling for food. I’m hungry.”
He rushed over to the phone. “Put it down.”
“What? Why?”
“Beatrice, put it down.”
There was an authority to his voice that was difficult to resist. I put the phone down just as reception answered. “What’s the big deal?”
He gestured at all the equipment scattered across the room. “What happens when room service comes up here and sees all this?”
I looked around at the tripods, the cameras, the wires. “Maybe they think we’re filming a movie,” I said, grinning.
“Are you serious?”
I rolled my eyes. “Obviously not… why don’t we just throw a tarp over it all? Or ask them to leave it at the door? Nobody has to come in.”
He shook his head. “My father gave instructions. His men will bring us something to eat.”
Almost as if we had summoned them—and maybe we had, there were surely listening devices in the room—someone knocked on the bedroom door. Lucien’s expression darkened. I could tell the same thought had crossed his mind. After taking a deep breath, he walked up to the door and opened it.
One of Mason’s men stood there with a bag in his hand. Wordlessly he handed the bag over to Lucien. Lucien nodded, then shut the bedroom door.
“That was creepier than the pictures you showed me,” I said.
Lucien gave me a cold, hard stare. With his eyes, he said enough.
They’re listening.
